Page 19 - BusinessWest July 6, 2020

Banking & Financial Services
Pandemic Lessons
Banks and Credit Unions Ponder How Their Business Will Change
IBy Joseph Bednar
t’s the wave of the future, Rich Kump said — and the COVID- 19 pandemic simply cast that wave in sharper relief.
“We’ve had a goal of moving routine transactions out of the branch,” the president of UMassFive College Federal Credit Union told BusinessWest. “We’ve been educating our members for three years, trying to move them out of the branch, and there’s still a percentage of America who just likes to everything in person. You need to take a thoughtful approach; you can’t force people into it ... although COVID did that, to some extent.”
A widely held vision of the bank (or credit union) branch
of the future — one shared, to some degree, by other local bank-
ing leaders we spoke with — does indeed promote robust online and mobile tools for routine business like deposits and withdraw- als, leaving less traffic in branches, but a greater percentage of that traf- fic given over to more complex or consultative matters.
“We’ve had
a goal of moving routine transactions out of the branch.”
And many people who have long resisted online banking are singing a different tune, said Paul Scully, presi- dent of Country Bank.
“Customers, just because of the nature of the pandemic, with people staying at home, started exploring technology,” he noted. “An amazing number of people are using technology who, for a number of years, fought it.”
In most cases, it’s just a matter of
Rich Kump says the pandemic has forced people who had been reluctant to bank remotely to give it a shot.
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